All creatures great and small
German forester Peter Wohlleben’s 2016 best-seller, “The Hidden Life of Trees,” showed nature writing at its best. With simple sentences and surprising themes, it kindled curiosity about the mysteries of the forests, and the fungal and bird worlds within them.
The success of Wohlleben’s debut makes his second book, on the thoughts and feelings of animals, more disappointing. “The Inner Life of Animals” tells stories of ordinary creatures Wohlleben encounters at home and work — dogs, squirrels, bees, pigs, crows — to demonstrate their intelligence and awareness.
Ticks, like humans, are “driven by desires”; horses “can feel ashamed or embarrassed just like we can”; pigs “can experience empathy.” Animals, Wohlleben maintains, should not be perceived as “mindless automatons driven by an inflexible genetic code, but as stalwart souls and lovable rascals.” The book looks at how emotions and life stages in human experience — like fear, selflessness and aging — play out in the animal kingdom. Animals have souls, Wohlleben argues, “in the religious sense of the word.”
“The Inner Life of Animals” suffers from two flaws. First, Wohlleben, who manages a forest in Germany, is an expert on trees, not animals. “The Hidden Life of Trees” drew from a lifetime of knowledge, with special attention to particular species like beeches and oaks that Wohlleben has long observed. The animals book leaps from species to species — including insects, mammals and even the slime mold, a fungi that demonstrates some animal-like characteristics. Wohlleben would argue that this casual, wide-ranging overview gives a fuller picture of the animal kingdom than scientists tend to do. But without deeper exploration, the book feels simplistic.
The larger problem is that the “wow” element is missing. Few pet owners will be shocked to read that animals, domestic and wild, have varying personality traits, like cowardliness or bravery. Anyone who pauses to think about it will realize that pigs feel pain (though it’s reasonable to offer a reminder, given the existence of factory farms and the glorification of eating bacon in our society). And it’s hardly news that animals carefully decide where they want to go to the bathroom.
Whereas in “The Hidden Life of Trees,” Wohlleben highlights the inner workings of oaks and beech — how they help their young, how they distribute sugar and interact with the endless fungal filaments around them — the general attributes of animals are simply far better known. His selling point remains an easy, conversational style — but here, his observations often verge on the obvious.
There’s no doubt that Wohlleben is a keen observer of nature, and readers will emerge with a store of interesting trivia. Billygoats use the scent of their own urine to attract females. Deer like to move to clearings after rainstorms because the noise of raindrops — still falling from trees even after the storm passes — obscures the sound of approaching predators. Some moths have a “thick furry layer,” the better to absorb (and thus quash) the sound signals coming from bats that hunt them.
Some assertions seem quite speculative. For instance, Wohlleben writes of how his dog, Maxi, can count — based on the fact that Maxi normally bounds awake early on weekdays, before the alarm, and sleeps in on weekends. But just a few pages earlier, he told of an early 20th century horse that supposedly could count and spell — though this myth was dispelled when the owner went away, for the horse — which had relied on the owner’s facial movements for the trick — could no longer perform. Perhaps Maxi was reacting to differences in expression and routine on Friday and Saturday nights? At another point in the book, Wohlleben acknowledges that one of his observations about horses’ feelings is “not the proven result of a scientifically controlled experiment.”
Many of the topics in “The Inner Life of Animals” could merit a book in themselves. Communication between animals, and attempted communication between people and animals, is a fascinating area. So is Wohlleben’s intriguing assertion that city suburbs are “hotspots of biodiversity.” The overall goal, he writes, is “not to anthropomorphize animals but to help us understand them better.” Sadly, this book offers merely a light, introductory sampling of a promising topic.